On the Jewish festival of Purim, we wear
masks as a disguise. It reflects the Purim story in which the true nature of the
events leading up to Jewish redemption from the threat of annihilation is
disguised as a series of apparent coincidences. In today’s upside-down world,
the positive activities of the State of Israel are mostly covered up by the
International media. Using some recent examples, I’ll now remove the mask to
reveal Israel’s true identity.

Israeli scientists have been responsible
for many breakthroughs in cancer treatments. But you wouldn’t know this if your
only news source was the British Broadcasting Corporation.In the past few months, Israeli cures for leukemia,
melanoma
and prostate
cancer were hidden
by the BBC until protests by the Weizmann Institute forced them to interview
one of the groundbreaking
professors.

If the BBC was
fair towards Israel, it would have praised
the recent joint study by Israeli and Palestinian Arab researchers into the risk
factors for B Cell Non-Hodgkin’s Lymphoma.After all, it reported in 1999
that King Hussain of Jordan had died of the very same cancer. It should also have
heralded
Dr. Sarit Larisch of Haifa University who discovered ARTS (a protein that
regulates normal cell death but is significantly
absent in tumors) and the Israeli biotech ARTSaVIT that is developing a
treatment based on her research.And how
could the Beeb have ignored another Israeli biotech, Medial
EarlySign, which has developed an early-warning system to expose
patients suffering from colon cancer, upper GI cancer, lung cancer, and
epilepsy?

I was literally shaking with anger when a
recent BBC radio broadcast didn’t even mention that the Exablate Neuro ultrasound
machine for treating tremor is made by Israel’s Insightec.The Beeb then buried the fact deep down in their
report on their website.And not a
murmur that, several weeks later, Israeli doctors at Haifa’s Rambam Medical
Center used Insightec’s MRI-guided ultrasound to cure a 60-year-old Palestinian
Arab from Bethlehem from severe essential tremor.Then, when paraplegic Claire Lomas completed
the UK’s 13.1 mile Great North run in a ReWalk exoskeleton, the BBC and many
others failed
to inform anyone that ReWalk
is Israeli.

I’ll now shed light on some other recent “revealing”
Israeli medical breakthroughs. Surgeons at Jerusalem’s Hadassah hospital can now
detect
and correct abnormalities in the fetus from eight weeks after
conception.Irregular heartbeats,
anemia, twins sharing placentas, congenital hernias, damaged spinal cords - Israeli
doctors are saving lives before they have even begun.

It can be extremely difficult to identify
compression fractures of the spine, but upload your X-ray to Israel’s Zebra
Medical Vision and its new diagnostic algorithm can find it or
assess your risk of getting one.Meanwhile, Hebrew University of Jerusalem scientists have discovered
that dyslexics have a shorter implicit memory than non-dyslexics. On hearing a
sound repeated sometime later, dyslexics failed to recognize it.The findings pave the way to early diagnosis and
intervention.And for those people who
cannot communicate, Israel’s Medasense has developed a monitor to reveal
how much pain they are suffering, allowing doctors to administer the
appropriate relief.

To those for whom
everything is concealed, due to Age-related Macular Degeneration (AMD) there
is light at the end of the tunnel. Firstly, the US FDA has now approved the
Israeli-developed Implantable
Miniature Telescope from VisionCare. Secondly, two Israeli companies, Inomize
and Nano-Retina have teamed up to build the tiny Bio-Retina,
which should be revealed
to the medical marketplace in 2019.

Finally, Israel
may not always see eye-to-eye with its neighbors in the Middle East, but there
is no disguising who can provide the best medical treatment.In the latest example, top Israeli eye surgeon
Dr Ygal Rotenstreich of Sheba Medical Centre flew to the UK in a last-ditch
attempt to save the sight of an Iraqi father-of-seven. Turkish doctors had revealed
to him that Israel is at the cutting-edge of optical medicine.

Many readers say that they are amused by
some of the articles in my positive weekly Israel newsletter featuring
Israeli innovations, discoveries and humanitarian activities.Here are a few recent examples.

Israel’s Amit Goffer invented the ReWalk
exoskeleton that enables paraplegics to walk upright.Unfortunately, Amit is a quadriplegic.After explaining repeatedly that ReWalk
couldn't help him, he went on to invent UPnRide which allows him (and
other quadriplegics) to move around vertically.

Students in International Space
University’s Space Studies Program at Israel’s Technion Institute had a group
selfie photo taken. Nothing strange there, I hear you say, but they
arranged for the photo to be taken from a height of 520 kilometers by the
EROS-B satellite, built by Israel Aerospace Industries and operated by Israel’s
ImageSat International.

Many people cannot bear to be without Wi-Fi
for a moment – even whilst on holiday.So Hornblower Niagara Cruises (the official Canadian Tour Boat operator in Niagara Falls)
has deployed the FiberinMotion® mobility solution from Israel’s RADWIN to
provide high-speed
wireless connectivity onboard its boats.So now you can “surf” (the Internet) from the
edge of the most powerful waterfall in North America.

Israel’s Skitza Print has produced a
concrete bench from a paper mold. Skitza used their Israeli Highcon Euclid
digital cutting machine to produce a 4000-layer mold from recycled paper, making
a spectacular two-meter bench (entitled Morpheus) using Israeli Eco-concrete.The bench was exhibited in Taipei until
mid-August.

It gets little publicity, but contrary to
the Arab boycott, Israel performs a vital function to Arab states in facilitating
the importing of goods from Europe.Israel
has just built a railway
line from Haifa to the Jordanian border to handle this trade - the
previous route through Syria is no longer available for obvious reasons.Trade between Israel and Jordan has increased
by 65% since 2010.Some say that even migratory birds may have
changed their route to go via Israel after Saddam Hussain’s army set fire to
the Kuwaiti oil wells and caused the
largest oil spill in history!

On that subject, Israel's Wildlife Hospital
has opened the first blood bank
in the world for birds that arrive injured to the country during migration.Hospital veterinarians realized that they
could better treat the birds if they had a blood bank for them because, much
like humans, birds have different blood types.

The international media enjoys attacking the
Jewish State for not accepting more African Muslim migrants.Yet hundreds of Eritrean asylum-seekers marched
in Tel Aviv in support of a UN probe into the Eritrean regime,
considered one of the world's most repressive.One typical demonstrator said, "for a march like this one we would
already be dead in Eritrea."

Some countries in the European Union have
also not been overly friendly to Israel on the political front recently.So it was a nice to hear
that the Belgium city of Antwerp greeted Israeli President Reuven Rivlin with the Israeli
national anthem “Hatikvah” (The Hope) played on the bells of the city
cathedral.

Please take a look at the peppers sold in
Europe’s supermarkets during January and February. If they are marked “Dutch Peppers”, don’t
believe the labels.They will have actually
been grown in greenhouses in the Arava
desert beside the Dead Sea and then exported to Holland.European
peppers cannot be propagated commercially in the middle of the Northern
Hemisphere’s winter due to the lack of sunshine.Ironically, Yasser Arafat was offered part of
the Arava desert in a land swap peace deal in 2000 but rejected it, saying that
the land was unusable!

Finally, one particular amusing story is
about Israel's Mapal Green
that purifies the wastewater of nearly 50% of all the households in
England.It is even now used by Thames
Water Authority, which once boycotted Israel products because it had "many
and valued Arab clients".So I tell
all BDS supporters living in or visiting the UK that they must NEVER flush
their toilet in case they inadvertently promote Israeli technology.My wife wrote a letter
about this in the Jerusalem Post.The Letters' Editor decided to give it the title "Go with the
flow"!